


Worth it after all

by TerresDeBrume



Category: Glee
Genre: Coffee, Gen, Self Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 15:53:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13057212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: Kurt’s relationship with coffee. Or life, depending on how you look at it.





	Worth it after all

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Coffee History](https://archiveofourown.org/works/201269) by [TerresDeBrume](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume). 



> Rewrite of one of my oldest fics on AO3, written as a celebration of my 300th work published on the Archive!  
> Not all of them are complete and not all of them are very good, but I’m proud of myself for managing to put all of that out and for the progress I’ve made in the six years I’ve been posting there.
> 
> Merry holidays to me and, hopefully, a nice blast from the past for the rest of you ;)
> 
> Touches on pre-canon and canon events up to _Prom Queen_.

Kurt’s most vivid takeaway from his mother’s funeral is the phantom scratch of the cheap, ill-fitted suit his father had to borrow from a taller cousin. That, and the painful blueness of the sky. The rest fades faster than you’d think, swallowed by the black hole in his heart. In future years, if he tries hard, he’ll reconstruct a crowd of black-sleeved hands and a haze of murmurs; the bizarre impression that someone was about to yell ‘April’s fools!’ and end the nightmare.

He loses his mother’s smile to the decade following her death, the sound of her voice to John Farnham’s _Angel_ _s_ played too many times over his tears. The smell of her vanishes, too, swallowed by the bitter aroma of a black coffee going cold on the kitchen table while his father stared into nothing.

  
  


***

  
  


A year after the funeral, almost to the day, Kurt walks into the kitchen and finds his father nursing a mug of cold coffee, eyes lost in days gone past. Kurt hoists himself on his father’s lap and scrunches his nose at the sugarless, cream-free scent of the coffee mug. The drink, when Kurt takes a sip, is too strong and burns at his tongue in more ways than one. His faces crumples in disgusted confusion again, eyes squeezed shut until he realizes wiping at his tongue with his pajama sleeve won’t help with the taste and he protests:

  
  


“It’s icky! Why don’t you add sugar?”

“Your mom used to say you can’t really appreciate life until you’ve tried the real taste of it.”

  
  


Kurt twists to steal a glance at his father, his eyes still lost in a time he barely remembers, and frowns.

  
  


“I don’t get it,” he admits.

  
  


His father sighs.

  
  


“Yeah. Neither do I.”

  
  


The coffee goes down the drain.

  
  


***

  
  


Two weeks into high school, Kurt comes home shivering with cold as red slushy seeps through his shirt. He rushes through his evening routine and locks himself in his room much earlier than usual so he can consume his shame alone. He gets two fitful, scattered hours of sleep that night, and opens his eyes on the dreadful knowledge he won’t make it through the day without some kind of boost.

  
  


There’s so much cream, sugar and biscuit crumbs in his very first coffee it’s almost breakfast.

  
  


***

  
  


The very concept of having cream with coffee as his favored drink is deeply at odds with Kurt’s notions of a healthy life, but he can’t quite make himself shake the habit. High school is a long string of slushies and assignments, cruel words tenuous friendships, harsh sneers and a burning desire to be as flamboyant as he can manage. Sleep, in these conditions, is hard to come by, but coffee still tastes terrible. In this domain, as in many others, Kurt does what he must in order to get through the day.

Covering up works fine with the bullying. It works fine when Mercedes destroys his car. It works fine while his father lays motionless in a hospital bed. It fails miserably after his ill-fated attempt to redecorate his and Finn’s basement, but then there are limits even to self-deception.

  
  


***

  
  


There’s not enough whipped cream in the entire world to erase the taste of Karofsky’s lips from his own.

  
  


***

  
  


Dalton Academy should be a black coffee kind of place. There’s no one to hide from here, nothing to fear. Uniformity is made into safety. It surrounds him, embraces him, suffocates him, the abstract shape of him squeezed into the sharp crease of a conformism he always felt too big for.

Dalton Academy should be a black coffee kind of place, but Kurt drowns himself in cream and sugar, and tells himself it’s a habit more than a need.

  
  


***

  
  


The coffee Kurt orders after he’s elected prom queen is pretty much a heart attack in a cup. He would lecture his father in a thousand different ways if he even thought of taking a sniff from it but, just this one, Kurt allows himself the hypocrisy. Prom queen, in itself, isn’t even that bad a title. In a different place, with different people, he’d be proud of it. Here in McKinley, it was only ever meant to hurt him, and it did a fine job of it.

On the other side of the table, Blaine looks at him with worried eyes and asks what he can do to help. Kurt almost, almost says he’s fine. That’s what he would have done before, after all. Pretend he was fine and avoid talking about the incident until he managed to push it out of his mind entirely. It worked well enough so far, and it would work again, but…that would mean forgetting Blaine, too. Oh, Kurt can forget the dance if he wants to. He can put the crown, the stifling silence, the cruel looks right out of his mind. It’s just that if he did, he’d never remember the reason for Blaine’s smile and their hands entwined, heart filling with enough joy to leave no place for even the shadow of bigotry.

None of it was perfect. Not in the way Kurt used to dream of, at any rate. No cheering crowd, no comfortable anonymity. Somehow though, the terrible parts of the evening make Blaine’s presence all the brighter, as if the bitter irony of that night was only ever meant to underline how sweet Kurt’s boyfriend was. Kurt nearly snorts to himself at his own thoughts, but it doesn’t change the truth of them. There’s no way he wants to forget Blaine, even if he looks a little ridiculous with his brow furrowed in confusion.

  
  


“It’s nothing,” he promises after a brief but heartfelt kiss. “I think I just understood a thing my mom used to say.”

  
  


Kurt dumps seven dollars worth of cream in the trash and orders himself a black coffee. It’s still bitter but, after years of searching, he finally finds the rich aromas people kept making a fuss about, and what do you know.

  
  


It is worth it after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and reviews make me want to keep writing ;)


End file.
